But deGrasse Tyson also has a serious side, which he reveals time and again in his books, shows, Twitter page, and popular science articles.

Often, deGrasse Tyson's humor strikes a serious chord that not only makes us laugh but also think. As a popular science educator, deGrasse Tyson is out to inspire generations of innovators to reach for the stars.

While it's tough to narrow down his best quotes, we've taken a stab here. We've also paired some of them with photos of the most impressive science projects of our age:

"The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it."

"During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore — in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us."

"I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before."

"I am trying to convince people — not only the public, but lawmakers and people in power — that investing in the frontier of science, however remote it may seem in its relevance to what you're doing today, is a way of stockpiling the seed corns of future harvests of this nation."

Apollo astronaut holds the American flag on the moon.Bloomsbury Auctions

"As an educator, it's my duty to empower you to think. So that you can go forth and think accurate thoughts about how the world is put together."

"Within one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) than all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world."

Tasha Sturm, a microbiology tech at Cabrillo College in California, gently stamped her 8-year-old's hand on this petri plate one morning after he had finished getting ready for the day, cleaned up a few things in the back yard, and pet the dog. What you're seeing are teams of harmless bacteria that were on his hand at the time.Courtesy of Tasha Sturm at Cabrillo College via MicrobeWrold

"Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it?... If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on."

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator every built, and in 2012 physicists used it to detect a Higgs boson, also known as the "God Particle."CERN/LHC/GridPP

"A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace — a physicist is a trained problem solver. How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, 'I wasn't trained for this!' That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, 'Cool.'"

When an oxygen tank exploded mid-way through the Apollo 13 mission, NASA had to figure out how to get the astronauts back home. Shown here is astronaut John L. Swigert, at right, with the "mailbox" rig improvised to adapt the Command Module's square carbon dioxide scrubber cartridges to fit the Lunar Module, which took a round cartridge.Kim Dismukes

"It's the inspired student that continues to learn on their own. That's what separates the real achievers in the world from those who pedal along, finishing assignments."

Last July, a NASA-led team made history by sending the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto, and what they discovered were mysteries that planetary scientists will be brewing over for many years to come.NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

"If you ask adults how many teachers — out of the scores in elementary, middle school, high school, college and graduate school — made a singular impression on who and what they are, it's never more than three or four teachers. Everybody else is a distant second to this set. When we finally create a cloning machine, we should clone those teachers."

"Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow."

The distribution of dark matter is shown in blue and the gas distribution in orange. This simulation is for the current state of the Universe and is centered on a massive galaxy cluster. The region shown is about 300 million light-years across.Illustris Collaboration

"Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars."

This Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest-seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.NASA Goddard Space Flight Center